Patience & Persistence. When you go to a tech meetup, tech party, or read tech headlines, it’s easy to get swept away into thinking things are soaring for a number of startups.
Company xyz now has a zillion users, another company just went viral, overnight sensation, etc. It’s easy to fall in love with those headlines or worse, it’s easy to be distracted. The truth of the matter is that it hardly ever goes straight up and to the right. When you dig into the history of these companies the real thing to fall in love with is the founders/employees drive to dig through the pain over an extended period of unease, stress, unknown, fear and make something valuable. The story hasn’t been fully written but consider companies like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Fab, AirBnB and plenty others. Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012. Blake Masters Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012 Update: Peter and I have written a book, based on these notes.
Zero to One is a #1 NYT Bestseller, with more than 2.5 million copies sold worldwide. Order it here. Here are my essay versions of my class notes from CS183: Startup.
Basics. At the beginning... About Silicon Valley. Start up culture. Recruitment. Running a start-up. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. Business development. Live events. Startup boards. Lawyer & start-up. Startup ecosystems. Learning from failures. Learning from the best. OnStartups Answers. Customer development. Bootstrapping.